The Basic Writing Experimental Research Of Applying "The Lexical Chunks" To Grade2Senior High School

The new English Curriculum Criteria were issued in2004in GuangdongProvince, which enhanced the requirements for students’ writing ability, so the writingpart of the college entrance examination of Guangdong Province has increased fromone passage to two----one is basic writing and the other is task-oriented writing. As anEnglish teacher of a middle school, the author of this thesis carefully studied thewritten versions of basic writing of the college entrance examinations of GuangdongProvince and she found that there are a large number of phrases, idioms and sentencepatterns appearing in the written versions of basic writing. Those reminded the writerof the theory of the Lexical Chunks put forward by Michael Lewis. The lexicalchunks consist of simple words, some regular or irregular phrases and sentencepatterns, so when we consider them as smallest unit in a language in a context, theyare some individuals with certain form, meaning and function. In this case, we cancompare a language with a corpus which is made up of different lexical chunks, andthe combinations of lexical chunks develop into the sentences which can play animportant part in forming a passage. Because of the characteristics of lexical chunks,they are widely used in the spoken and written English. That’s why people are evennot afraid of making mistakes when they communicate with each other by usinglexical chunks. Some specialists ever did some researches into the lexical chunks,most of which are about applying the lexical chunks to teaching in college or forcollege students. So the studies about applying the lexical chunks to teaching in seniorhigh school are not enough.This experiment aims to apply the lexical chunks to teaching writing in the seniorhigh school. Nowadays, the approaches to writing widely used in English classes areprocess approach and product approach. Product approach focuses its attention to thegrammar mistakes and wrong collocations in the student’s composition, but neglectsthe structure of the passage and fail to guide the students in the process of writing.Process approach emphasizes the writing process, and it not only gets students to pay attention to the structure of the passage but presents students the process of writing.However, it can’t help students to overcome the mistakes caused by the negativetransfer of their native language and some Chinese English as well as the repeatedgrammatical mistakes. In order to help students to overcome them and let students beconfident about writing, the writer, based on the theory of Swain’s output hypothesis,guide the students to practice writing in English classes. In addition, the writer alsointroduced the theory, Micro-organizers and Macro-organizers (Nattinger&DeCarrico) to the students to make them realize the important role the lexical chunksplay in the structure of a passage and form of the target language.In order to test the effectiveness of lexical chunk approach used in the basicwriting, the writer carried out an experiment between the two classes of grade two.Before the experiment, the writing levels of the two classes were equal according tothe scores of the basic writing in the pretest, the final examination. During theexperiment, the writer applied lexical approach to the writing and reading classes inthe experimental class. As for the controlled class, the traditional way of teaching wascontinued. After two months, in the posttest, the average scores for the basic writingof the two classes were quite different, and SPSS16.0was employed for statisticanalysis. Moreover, the writer had an interview with some students in theexperimental class, which prove that students’ interest in writing has been motivated.In this case, the writer can prove that the lexical approach applied in the teaching ofwriting is effective. Not only can it improve the student’s writing ability; but also thisapproach can raise the students’ interest in writing.